An enduring cliché among the footloose international is to view Paris as inhospitable despite its allure, even sublime in its callousness: a tension jarringly unresolved in English letters. From Hemingway to Wilde, from Wright to Joyce, our age has seen a veritable Parnassus decamp, across the Channel or the Atlantic, at the dawn of oft-unpromising writing careers. Parisiandom became for these Anglo littérateurs a rite of passage, its neon sparkles cast on the squalid underside of bohemian transgression. Tantalized by the impenetrable aloofness of its elite, spirited self-makers en route to literary fame remain to this day beguiled by the bejeweled City.
Simon Kuper, a 30-year veteran of the Financial Times, belongs in a special subset of that species. Born in Uganda to South African parents, his move to Paris in 2002 was the next logical step in an already world-spanning career. Naturalized French two decades ago with his wife, an American writer, and with their kids now “Parisian as pigeons” and himself a “cantankerous” denizen, Impossible City (2024) recounts rising to midlife in Paris. The relatable ordeals of assimilation that he narrates may read also as a reflection, if unwitting, on the unglamorous downsides of our era’s reigning cosmopolitanism.
Kuper avers to have imbued the notion of Paris as a “a place almost devoid of French people that serves as a stage for the white Anglophone hero,” its pavement terraces “turning the city into a stage set,” arguably devoid of the black characters whom the play also starred. Yet his journey into Parisianness was off to a more prosaic launch: a daring whim for an eastern Parisian flat over a London mortgage. Dysfunctions in housing, transit, and the rudiments of daily life are duly noted in what Kuper now calls a “true home.” He touts the hazier allure of Paris in contrast to that same grinding reality. Odes are penned to the futurist metropolis, the catalyst for France’s modernization, and the “crucible of ethnic conflict” miraculously pacified. What is meant as a writer’s moving tale of falling into place ends up reeking at times of city-brand propaganda.
Kuper’s optimism is first seen in his refutation of what he calls the “Anglo evolutionary narrative” of the hexagon and its capital. In this alternative view, the French are derided for dwelling in an economic time capsule, with their lavish pensions and benefits, regulatory overkill, and round-the-year strikes all taking continental welfarism a tad too far. Seldom exhorted with the Teuto-Nordic sermonizing reserved for France’s southern neighbors, the latter increasingly echo the Gallo-critic judgements of the Anglosphere. Education is among the traits most fated for obsolescence in Kuper’s view, and he notes the world-beating pessimism bred in France’s draconian school system that prizes “abstract reasoning from first principles” over facts, which the French resent as “boring, unimaginative, low-status things.”
This hints at the oddity of the world’s Anglo-elite: ever-so dynamic, yet irreducibly Francophile. French schooling—with its outdated rigors, incontrovertibly severe grading system, and way of treating “parents as know-nothing irritants”— appears desirable not despite being passé but because of that resistance to change. Kuper even speaks of a pre-filled form passed down across generations of expats eager to enroll their kids in neighborhood crèches, touting the benefits of a would-be Anglo classmate. This is not unlike many a French lycée abroad, with their arcane strictures, ruthless marking, and scant concern for easing access into local universities—yet still beset by lengthy admission queues filled with locals. Reform of such a system is sought by its foreign clientele on paper only, with French recalcitrance often the distinguishing core of the attraction.
With meritocracy in for a West-wide reckoning, Kuper sees in Paris the most self-deluded face of that ethos, an elitist smokescreen for inherited stratification. When graced with a column at the Financial Times to report at will on his acculturation, he “freed himself from the media bubble” while “never joining the status dance” of elite Paris. He hobnobbed as mere witness to the aristocracy that spans the French state, high culture, and big business: “the smallest ruling class of any big country” locking up privilege through in-family transmission of social capital. Lost amidst a “density of excellence,”—its web of sociality also a mutual defence mechanism against the country’s egalitarian rigors—Kuper was piercing the sphere at one of its most testing moments.
Before Macron and his generation “conquered” that elite, before they were even “plotting to update it,” signs of fraying abounded. With toadies flanking their fellow énarque, Macron’s predecessor Hollande went about the presidential groove unperturbed by being loathed beyond his back-scratching coterie. Kuper quotes at length the memoirs of Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Hollande’s chief-of-staff, to show that, to this day, “shared elite membership overrides ideology” to the point where elitism becomes the ideological substance. And while Macron’s victory in 2017 was read as ushering in something of a top-down self-abolition of the elite, some in-group trends have actually deepened the disconnect.
Granted, affirmative action was re-affirmed, with an emphasis on race that was in line with Anglo-American notions of social justice. Enrollment into grandes écoles from non-elite high schools is up, while the ENA, which made a regime out of that sticky form of elite reproduction, is undergoing an historic overhaul. Yet Kuper insinuates that gesturing towards equity can end up further amassing opportunity and privilege around Paris. While elite schools were often a pipeline for the plucky sons of the lower- and middle-classes, through which they could seek prestige in Paris, the city “has been moving beyond its centuries-old reliance on provincial talent.” The prize dangled by the meritocracy shines brighter when wealth concentrates, the race for distinction intensifies, and the asset of insiderdom is prized at a younger age, with remote locales at a loss to provide these tantalising prospects. At times, Macron’s movement has dizzyingly accelerated this falsely meritocratic spiral.
Besides, by focusing on hauling into the elite kids from non-nationally French and non-racially white backgrounds—a combination found in few places like in Paris—the social ladder grows to encompass the color spectrum at the price of a regional bias. The skew even becomes class-based, when a prizing of race over class sees the sons of the third-world elite leapfrog striving locals. Elite schools, along with the state and corporate institutions they feed, are thus further severed from the native middle-classes of the hinterland.
The more general view of France as fashionable but outmoded taps on different wellsprings to emerge from both the political Right and Left, a battle fought ardently in Kuper’s Anglophone media. On the right of the country’s large British press corps, a beat is made out of tarnishing the French as poor custodians of their land, heritage, and even distinctive genius. With a “utilitarian view of nationality” derived from his family, instead, and having always found nationalism “ludicrous,” Kuper claims that these and other “British nationalists” (a reference to Brexit) have “stripped me of my Europeanness,”—regained only after an arduous French naturalization process.
Meanwhile, the Left’s own rejection of France is now mostly found on the pages of The New York Times and The Guardian. The 2016 death in custody of Adama Traoré, whom the U.S. liberal press would later portray as France’s own George Floyd, saw scores of op-eds indict the country as an even more racist hellhole than America, with its unreckoned colonial legacy and false meritocracy. Secularism came in for some flak, as well. The beheading of Samuel Paty and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo were often tacitly—and odiously—excused in the same legacy mediascape, where any attempt to question the role of Islam in France’s social fabric, even in the wake of the Bataclan bloodbath, is still routinely denounced as Islamophobic.
In Kuper’s account, Paris is where both critiques converge: its “elite needs to change” to satisfy the world’s demands. Progressively inclined on social issues but writing for the fiscally conservative FT, our author has watched the events since the 2017 presidential election with glee. Macron’s party realigned the spectrum by pandering not only to the hip bloc of upper-class cultural lefties, or “bobos,” who had mostly voted for the socialists in prior races, but also to the future-minded center-right: bourgeois and Catholic-rooted, but concerned with a potential economic collapse under far-right rule. The former inhabit Kuper’s corner of eastern Paris, while the bon chic, bon genre kind dominate the city’s West, where they are supported by the traditional blend of conservatism and entrepreneurialism that marks Western France as a whole.
Assembling the two blocs into a single governing party is the kind of revolution that Kuper may have rooted for from London. But Impossible City is very much an on-the-ground book: a prognosis of France’s future built upon glimpses of this political coagulation, nursing the paradox that any attempt to restrain elitism must come from above. What he reports in higher education, culture, and social norms is offered as a harbinger for what is to come nationwide, if not globally. With Paris a byword for the French upper crust, the book proceeds from the belief that “as goes the elite, so goes the country.”
When he addresses the changes that are taking place, Kuper refers not to linguistic supremacism, which remains rock-solid in Paris and neutralizes his British wit (“my IQ dropped sharply when I spoke,” he writes, and “I couldn’t come up with the instant sardonic put-down”). Nor does he mean the “nightmare of sophistication” that is Paris, with its prizing of elegance over transparency: when writing that “the undersides of things can be filthy, but surfaces must shine,” he is not merely referring to riding the metro as opposed to the overground. He sees no change, either, in the culture of “disagreement for the sake of it” that produces at times a “city of charlatans” where leadership is shown with a raised temper. In fact, he doesn’t mean any behavioural codes at all. Resigned to the tightknit, code-based socializing that belies a low-trust society, a narcissistic elitism, or both, Kuper even founded a supper club of Anglo-Parisians, to commendable success.
This is a powerful rebuke, if parenthetic, to David Goodhart’s famous dichotomy of the “anywheres” and the “somewheres.” The former category has been commonly defined as having a rapport with places—the ability of the top 1% to fly anywhere and feel at home, making an identity out of their uprootedness—as well as participating in the global sociology of likeminded cosmopolitans. Yet the French exemplar of the “anywheres” is more an individual than a collective concept. As a group, they seem to mix far less with the deracinated elites of other countries. Even as they despise their own, they appear at greater pains to turn that detachment into a bond of transnational connexion.
Kuper is referring neither to the culture of gossip, flirting, and adultery that contributes to so much of Parisian glamour. But he is pointing at profound shocks to the sexual libertinism that has marked the city since the 1960s, lately met with a belated wave of feminist rage. His progressivism turns against France on this score, viewing the country’s emboldened generation of feminists as somehow relying on the traditional Anglo-critique of Parisian “sexual depravity.” Instead, he argues that it was only with the help of world attention that the victims, erstwhile dismissed as a pawn of the “Anglo-puritans,” gained world attention to trigger a properly French #MeToo moment.
But Paris is embracing the world in less ghastly ways, too, in changes Kuper acknowledges. The city’s downtown is “de facto becoming bilingual,” attracting “large numbers of ambitious foreigners of the sort who traditionally headed to London or New York.” Even French elitists are ceasing to view a state career as the prize of a lifetime, with an alternative path trod by meritocrats, such as Jean Tirole and Michel Houellebecq have done with economics and the novel. By taking French excellence to hitherto untravelled reaches, the country is ultimately forced to appreciate its globalized stars. The repositioning of Paris comes with downsides, too. Kuper frets about the shift from gentrification to plutocratisation, with the “city center morphing from an open-air museum into an open-air Louis Vuitton store.” Paris seems to be fending off the global risk of kleptocracy better than others, but it can’t let its guard down.
The risk, in short, is that the city might become a “giant gated community for the rich.” When he moved, Kuper recalls its identity lying somewhere between “a kind of chilly Rome and London,” between a “museum-cum-food-hall” and an “entrepôt for the global 1%.” He watched it transform, moving dangerously towards the latter.
Presuming that he wouldn’t want to see London’s travails in his adopted home, Kuper commends the Hidalgo-Pécresse bipartisan tandem of local chieftains. The socialist mayor’s record of rats, dirt, and traffic anarchy is mostly given a pass, while the right-of-center regional premier is commended for positioning Paris as Europe’s megalopolis in the wake of Brexit. Kuper is at his most fawning when praising the 2024 Olympics—a “reversal of fortune” against the Anglosphere, a year after Brexit and twelve years after London scooped the same role—alongside the larger Grand Paris mega-project of urban renewal. His hope is that the latter would keep inside what little middle-class remains within the périph, confining plutocrats and seizing the advantage of gentrification without the associated unaffordability crisis. By easing transit access from the banlieues, he longs for a grand, new, cross-class Parisian identity to emerge. Some of the policy items he commends are outright boondoggles, such as a landscaped ring road to substitute the périph, and yet more multimillion investments in the low-income expanses everywhere beyond it.
Kuper’s way of commending Paris in its current direction ultimately reflects the naiveties and delusions of those who set it on this trajectory in the first place. There is a belief that urban planning projects can serve as a way to tame and pacify the city’s riot-ready ethnic youth. It takes a certain level of insular Parisian elitism to believe that radicalized hoodlums, whether into vandalism or Islamism, will be assuaged by city libraries, greenery, and sporting grounds. The book is criss-crossed by this confusion around race and class and a paternalism towards ethnic minorities. It is even features the disclaimer: “I am a well-off white man writing from Instagrammable Paris.”
of Paris on December 17, 2021. Photograph by Kiran Ridley/Getty Images.
Naturally, then, Kuper amalgamates the “immigrant experience” into his own. There’s no question that, excluding civil war, “Paris has no other choice than multiculturalism,” but he’s wrong to believe that the unavoidable is always conducive to the good, or that getting France into that impasse in the first place was remotely advisable. His reporting on Muslims is outright bizarre: he claims to have been “more afraid of motorists than of terrorists,” and that the nearly two million Islamic believers in Paris are mostly too busy getting on with life to participate in religious extremism (although an IFOP poll recently found 45% of them to view the October 7th massacre as an act of anti-colonial resistance). Kuper seems persuaded by the case—also debunked—that Islam is systematically discriminated against by French employers. A recent study found that job applicants who have French names preceding an Arab surname were actually favored over the Franco-Gallic crowd, proving that assimilation is prized within companies, and that it’s the refusal to discard foreign allegiances—not country of origin—that is viewed as correlated with worse attitudes towards the labor market. Kuper veers into virtue-signaling, too, when hyping his kids’ enrollment at multicultural schools and football games in the banlieues, as though the success of those experiences were a sound measure by which to judge France’s social fabric.
Kuper does show a remarkable sensibility for the plight of French Jews, although he quickly slips into odiously equating a Parisian Jew’s fear of antisemitic violence at the hands of black and brown youths with the fear by those same youths of being frisked by police. He recounts feeling Parisian for the first time in thirteen years after the shock of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but then goes on to recount telling Muslim friends “we’re with you” amidst the anecdotal bout of largely bloodless anti-Muslim reprisals that followed. Kuper even showed up at an ashstrewn banlieue days after Nahel Marzouk had been killed in 2023. In the wake of the weeklong riot that the police shooting in Nanterre ignited nationwide, still deadlier than the infamous 2005 saga, he sits down for a beer. He takes the fact that the burning and looting eventually subsided, after over a week of violent disorder, as a sign that the status quo is fine.
For whom is Impossible City intended? The story that Kuper tells is different from most of the stories told of Paris; but being Parisian or not means reading it through a different degree of rose-tinted considerations. Locals are flattered in their progressive vivre-ensemble, and they are reassured to read that citizen goodwill can tame the ethnic cauldron and the urban chaos. But beyond the boulevards, readers see the cartoonishly stuck-up Parisian elite being deceived about multiculturalism and hypertrophy.
Kuper’s adaptation to Paris is the authentic, but ultimately secondary, part to the book. He does quote Sacha Guitry, for whom it was “a city to be re-born in.” His journey rubs off on the place at times, making it look more hospitable than it really is. That someone of Kuper’s worldly appetites would slip into an otherwise hermetic citadel—a “Navel of the World,” yet so hostile to foreigners—bodes well for Paris’ 21st century fortunes. If discarding its rougher edges compromises the city’s soul and character, our adoptee has “Parisianism” to blame. While Parisians were the downer for Paris lovers once, Kuper shifts the prejudice towards a paradigm he names after it, or them. He chooses to embrace the city and its people in an ambitious bid for survival and endurance.
